MOBILE HOMES LOSE GROUND

When Margaret Reardon moved into the Carlson Court mobile home park in suburban Countryside three years ago, she counted on it being the last place she would call home.

What the 74-year-old widow did not count on was that her plans would someday collide with economic realities.

Antiquated sewer lines, leaky water mains and burgeoning development all around had made the 5-acre trailer park in southwest Cook County expendable.

Carlson Court this year probably will become another public storage complex. Come July 1, the 65 families living there must be gone.

''It`s starting to hit me like a ton of bricks,'' said Reardon, a slight woman who manages a sense of humor though her waning physical condition ties her to a breathing apparatus. ''I`ve suddenly started thinking, `What am I going to do?''`

It may be little solace, but the residents of Carlson Court are not alone in their predicament. Last year, the North Glenview Trailer Park succumbed to development. A luxury car dealership is replacing the mobile home park in north suburban Glenview.

''Unfortunately, this type of thing is happening all over the United States, and I think we will see a lot more of it, particularly in highly populated areas,'' said Phyllis Mannhalter, secretary of the Illinois Mobile Homeowners Association.

What these residents are discovering is that in metropolitan areas, the rectangular boxes of corrugated aluminum are anomalies, better suited perhaps to a rural lifestyle than a suburban subdivision.

Adding to the problem has been the difficulty of persuading local authorities to approve new mobile home parks.

''Generally the response is the same as it is with all forms of lower-cost housing,'' said Dan Gilligan, president of the National Manufactured Housing Federation.

''The citizens are up in arms. They don`t want lower-priced housing in their areas. And the cities talk a good game about wanting affordable housing; they just would rather have it in the county next door.''

For about 350,000 people in Illinois and 8.2 million nationwide, mobile homes have provided some of the benefits of home ownership at a fraction of the cost. Around the Chicago area, the price of a mobile home can run from $5,000 to $50,000, depending on the size and age of the house.

The owners are often elderly people who do not want the hassle of maintaining a house and do not need the space. Some, however, are like Donna Boritz, who is raising three children in a trailer at Carlson Court while she and her husband try to scrape together enough cash to buy a house.

Yet the characteristics that make this housing so affordable also have meant that the owners are left in a kind of regulatory abyss that affords them few protections. Because they rent their lots, usually on an annual basis, owners of mobile homes say there is little to prevent their landlords from selling the land out from under them.

''It is a unique situation because mobile home owners pay a substantial amount of money for their homes, but they are at the mercy of the park owners who have the absolute control over admission to the park,'' said Helen Cropper, an attorney for the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation who has represented mobile homeowners in eviction battles.

With little infrastructure to remove and no demolition required, mobile home parks make ideal sites for redevelopment. Last year, residents of the North Glenview Trailer Park discovered how precarious their position was.

In July 1988, they had filed a class-action suit against Joseph Bredemann, the owner of the park, after Bredemann proposed building a car dealership on the land. The tenants contended that state law allowed evictions only if the tenants violated their leases.

But last August, Cook County Circuit Judge Richard Curry ruled that Bredemann had the legal right to evict the residents.

''The mobile park owner does not take unfair advantage of mobile tenants when he decides to go out of business, and it has never been held to be unscrupulous for an owner to decide for himself how to use his property,''

Curry wrote in a sharply worded opinion.

Of course, the most obvious option for these homeowners is to move their trailers. After all, they are supposed to be mobile homes.

Yet the name has become almost a misnomer. The cost of moving a mobile home can run as much as $3,000. Even more of an obstacle to relocating, however, is finding a park willing to accept a trailer.

Most trailer parks around Chicago do not have the space. And if they do, the profits are higher bringing in a new trailer to sell instead of allowing entry to an older mobile home.

At Carlson Court, residents say they are quickly exhausting their options. Shirley Fulton, who has lived in her 12-by-20-foot trailer for the last four years with her two children, said the closest parks that seem willing to accept their homes are in Coal City, more than 40 miles away, and in Dixon, more than 80 miles away.

After word got out that the trailer park was shutting down, a trickle of offers to buy the homes came in. Fulton said they have amounted to little more than a few hundred dollars, substantially less than the equity tied up in the mobile homes. One owner has offered to donate his trailer to the local Fire Department to use for training.

''Part of the problem is the park is so old that there are a number of things that would have to be done to bring it up to code,'' said Carl Michaelsen, president of ODM Tool & Manufacturing Co., a metal stamping company that bought Carlson Court 10 years ago.

''No matter who was to purchase the park, if it was to stay as a trailer park, there are streets that would have to be paved, there would be new pads that would have to be installed, the electric service would have to be upgraded.''

To stem the dismantling of other trailer parks, the mobile home association has been lobbying for legislation similar to laws enacted in other states that would give the tenants the right of first refusal to buy the land. ''Because of local land use and zoning restrictions that prevent the developing of properties to place manufactured housing on, we are losing more sites than we are building, so it puts a lot of pressure on the marketplace,'' said Gilligan of the manufactured housing federation. ''It is certainly a problem.''